Ashton Kutcher’s KatalystHQ: From Its Humble Beginnings to Its Much Less Funny Success

[show=katalysthq size=large]Oh boy, a web series that’s set behind the scenes at a production company! And it’s documentary-style, like The Office! And it features a celebrity! And it’s branded entertainment! Seriously, is there any box on the “web series cliches” form that KatalystHQ doesn’t check off?

OK, to be fair, it seems like the concept for KatalystHQ didn’t start off as a “hey, guys, let’s try to rip off College Humor and Black20!” effort. Instead, the show, featuring the employees of the Ashton Kutcher-founded social media company, seems to have evolved fairly organically out of real, unscripted behind-the-scenes videos that were posted to Facebook, starting in 2008.

However, last February, Katalyst began a formalized version of the show with a much more structured format and heavy inclusion of sponsorship deals. And while partnering with Slide to distribute season 2 put the show on Blip and YouTube, it didn’t necessarily put the comedy in it — KatalystHQ: Vegas, for example, is like a half-baked episode of Punk’d (also produced by Kutcher). And yesterday evening, Kutcher hosted a live episode of Katalyst HQ via Ustream — which featured a fair amount of pre-recorded material on top of some awkward improvisation with the staff, most of it feeling staged and phony. The reality’s been lost, is pretty much the problem, and the videos play like just another web series about working in an office, which we really didn’t need.

what strikes me is the fairly low production values and weak reality camerawork, you’d think that
one function of the show would be to showcase the companies standard of work to future clients – after all their name is written all over it !